Aster Capital, a corporate-venturing-sponsored clean tech venture capital firm, has invested through its second EUR107m fund, in a $10m series A round for Iceotope, a UK environmentally friendly IT cooling specialist. Aster fund sponsors include Alstom, Solvay and Schneider Electric as well as the European Investment Fund (through the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme). Ombu Group, a UK investment company, also participated in the round. Innovator Capital acted as Iceotope’s exclusive financial advisor on the transaction.
In addition to the capital raised, the deal also allows Iceotope to establish close cooperation with Aster’s strategic sponsors, particularly Schneider Electric.
This investment represents a significant step in allowing Iceotope to further commercialise its cooling solutions for the £250bn global data centre and High Performance Computing (HPC) markets, the company has stated. It will help the company hire more staff, expand into new markets and add to its current product ecosystem. Iceotope will also now have more capital at its disposal to target larger transactions and more ambitious supercomputing projects.
John Bean, director R&D Data centre Cooling at Schneider Electric, said that the unit had been looking at various technical approaches to liquid cooling for years and concluded that Iceotope has created a scheme that “addresses performance and user experience expectations”.
According to Iceotope, the global IT ecosystem is said to account for ten percent of all electricity consumed across the globe and this is largely due to the current energy demand of data centres, HPC and supercomputing facilities. Iceotope claims that its technology is able to halve the energy requirement of these facilities and significantly reduce their infrastructure costs.